Member of Technical Staff (Software Engineer, Acceleration)

Pantera Capital; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 385,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Retirement plans

Fitness and commuter accounts

Job summary

A leading investment firm in San Francisco is looking for engineers to join their Acceleration team. This role focuses on using AI tools to enhance product delivery and optimize company operations. Ideal candidates will have 4 to 20+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration. Strong skills in Python and familiarity with AI models are essential. The position offers a salary range of $250K to $385K, along with a comprehensive benefits package.

Qualifications

• 4 to 20+ years of industry experience focused on infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration.
• Daily use of AI models/tools with strong intuition on their jagged frontiers.
• Strong understanding of work across technical, business, and operations teams.
• Broad working knowledge of stacks used by AI product & applied research companies.

Responsibilities

• Identify and execute opportunities to accelerate delivery with frontier AI capabilities.
• Develop empathy for technical and business teams' work to collaborate effectively.
• Make codebases and systems legible to AI.
• Help optimize quality-velocity balance using AI tools and agents.
• Stay updated on new AI tools/models and inspire their use across the company.
• Work with leadership to instill an AI-forward culture.

Skills

Python

AI models/tools

Rust

TypeScript

Go

Job description

Location

San Francisco, New York City

Employment Type

Full time

Department

AI

Compensation

• $250K – $385K • Offers Equity

U.S. Benefits

Full-time U.S. employees enjoy a comprehensive benefits program including equity, health, dental, vision, retirement, fitness, commuter and dependent care accounts, and more.

International Benefits

Full-time employees outside the U.S. enjoy a comprehensive benefits program tailored to their region of residence.

USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions. International salaries are set based on the local market. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Perplexity is seeking creative, AI-pilled engineers to join our Acceleration team. Our company is reshaping the way people navigate the internet and the wider world. The Acceleration team's mandate is to continually uplevel the way our company and our teams operate, to deliver order-of-magnitude improvements in product and user experience.

Just as Perplexity is heralding an agentic future for the internet, you will ensure that our company makes the best use of AI tools and agents to multiply the leverage of our lean, mission-focused teams. Today, Perplexity uses AI tools across everything we do, from frontend and backend engineering to applied AI research and business operations. Tomorrow’s AI technology will be even more capable, and the Acceleration team will lead both software and process engineering to harness AI so that the company can deliver at maximum velocity.

The ideal candidate will possess sound technical judgment forged in the trenches of internet-scale companies, paired with voracious use of today’s most advanced AI tools/models and a capacious imagination to rethink how work gets done in the leading companies of tomorrow. They should thrive in a hybrid role that marries facets of AI product development, infrastructure/platform engineering, developer experience, and more.

Responsibilities

• Identify, prioritize, and execute on the highest-potential opportunities to accelerate Perplexity’s delivery cadence with frontier AI capabilities.
• Develop empathy for the nuances of our technical and business teams’ work across disciplines and verticals, toward collaborating with them to harness AI in new ways.
• Make our codebases, systems, and knowledge stores legible to AI.
• Help the company triangulate toward the optimal point on the quality-velocity Pareto frontier, while shifting that frontier outward with AI tools and agents.
• Keep abreast of new AI tools/models and make maximally effective use of them in your own work, setting an example across the company and inspiring others to do the same.
• Help the company make high-conviction bets on specific technologies in situations where indecision is a comfortable and tempting default.
• Work with engineering leadership, recruiting, and others to ensure we instill an AI-forward culture and select for those who will thrive in such an environment.
• Note: this is an extremely technical and hands-on role. Strong vision and creativity is necessary but not sufficient for success. You will be expected to build both prototypes and production systems, as well as to reengineer our codebases, infrastructure, processes, and anything else that must evolve to realize this vision.

Qualifications

• 4 to 20+ years of industry experience, ideally with a substantial portion focused on infrastructure/platform engineering or developer acceleration in environments featuring significant technical complexity.
• Daily use of AI models/tools, along with strong intuition on their jagged frontiers.
• Proficiency with Python, along with experience and/or desire to learn more about Rust, TypeScript, Go, and other languages.
• Strong understanding of (and empathy for) the work of technical staff across disciplines, along with an enthusiasm to learn about the work of business and operations teams.
• Broad working knowledge of the typical stacks used by AI product & applied research companies. (For example: you don’t need to have experience hand-rolling CUDA kernels, but you should know what CUDA is and when/where/why it’s used.)
• An obsession with improving the legibility of (and reducing brittleness in) both software and human-orchestrated processes.
• Experience navigating tricky exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, balancing the need to ship today with the need to build capacity for tomorrow.

Compensation Range: $250K - $385K